It’s a little worrisome that Chang-rae Lee can imagine the future America as such a specific,
believable Third World country.

The dystopia of his new novel,
On Such a Full Sea, isn’t literary escapism; it is a firm, quiet warning.

With futuristic sci-fi, the devil is frequently in the details, but Lee’s imagined world never
fails to prove convincing.

The teenage heroine, Fan, is a diver in the tanks of fish sold by the city of B-Mor (Baltimore
until it was turned into a gigantic fishery) to the Charter towns and villages — settlements of the
wealthy who carefully keep B-Mor and other cities (such as D-Troy) indebted to them.

Fan leaves the village in pursuit of her boyfriend, Reg, a young man with immunity to a plague
that ravages everyone else, rich and poor. He has been spirited away by the government for study,
and she must break taboo and follow.

Between the production facilities and the wealthy hamlets, there are what Lee calls “the
counties,” one of the book’s many unassumingly perfect locutions. Under no government except the
rule of might, the people in the counties pity Fan, abuse her and at one point memorably try to
force her into a traveling troupe of acrobats.

On one level, this is a novel about slavery: Fan is sold frequently, sometimes for horribly
understandable reasons. Her story is brilliantly plotted — the last few pages twist and double back
in thrilling ways — but the novel’s power comes from the long discursive passages about B-Mor in
all its unfairness.

Lee seems to question the readerly love of triumph over adversity in a book where so many
characters’ future lives are a hop, skip and a stumble away from people we might know.

The author really breaks out the satirical thumbscrews when the story arrives in a Charter
village: Even his good characters are compromised by their wealth.

“She would become an all-hands mother,” Lee writes, “which meant managing every last aspect of
the helpers’ and cooks’ tasks and responsibilities, and overseeing the post-school tutors for the
children, as well as the clothes shopping and interior design, plus, of course, arranging the
doctors’ visits and the vacations.”

Really? All by herself?

It is a laugh line out of context. In its proper place in the story, though, it is simply
another of Lee’s apparently bloodless descriptions of the way things are.

Like the best future fiction,
On Such a Full Sea demands uncomfortable questions of the present.